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Reviews

Incredibly intense and meticulously researched, The Assault is a vividly realistic portrayal of the true-life events that gripped a TV audience of over 21 million viewers on Saturday December 24th 1994.

It’s Christmas Eve 1994. A flight from Algiers bound for Paris is hijacked and 227 passengers are taken hostage by a militant group of heavily armed Islamic terrorists. The authorities’ only hope of saving the passengers is to enlist the GIGN, an elite special-forces unit. But it’s a deadly mission of survival that will escalate into a violent confrontation that’s both brutal and moving. Directed by Julien Leclerq, The Assault stars Vincent Elbaz, Gregori Derangere, Melanie Bernier, Aymen Saidi and Marie Guillard.

“The kind of serious, adult action movie that the US and the UK struggle to make." The Guardian

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

In the 1990's Algerian militants hijacked an Air France flight on the runway in Algiers. For a time the local authorities wouldn't allow the flight to leave, but under French pressure they eventually allowed the aircraft to transit to Marseilles where GIGN police commandos assaulted the aircraft. This film is the true(-ish) story of the hijacking and its eventual resolution.

There are three main strands to the story, the first concerns the drama on the aircraft itself, the second the efforts of politicians and civil-servants in Paris to manage the situation and the third concerns the struggle of one GIGN operator and his family to come to terms with the constant pressure and uncertainty of the job. All of these are well handled, but the Paris section is the weakest of the three and has a scene that stretched my suspension of disbelief to breaking point. The drama is compelling, the performances are excellent and the action scenes suitably exciting. That said, it's not a full-on Hollywood actioner, so don't be expecting another Die Hard. It's far closer in tone to the Scandi crime dramas that have been so popular on TV in the UK recently.

My main reservation was the visual tone of the film, the washed-out, desaturated colour palette is initially distracting but eventually became plain irritating.

The version that I watched was subtitled, which I prefer to the dubbed option whenever possible. The subtitling seemed good but even my limited French picked up some unlikely translations.

French Movie detailing real life event that occured back in 1994A chilling plot pre-dating 9/11 that could have had similar consequences, but for the efforts of GIGN, the Frenchequivalent of the SAS.It's an engaging movie for fans of this genre, a little dark & moody & from what I know of the actual event, pretty accurate in it'sportrayal of what happened. The slowish build up keeps you interested & includes some human-interest to flesh out the "main" character a bit - it then builds to it's inevitable adrenalin-rush climax.I liked it :)

This is the story on how France in 1994 was able to avoid their "9-11" tragedy. Unfortunately the lessons learned from this incident didn't prevent our 9-11 as some critics have claimed it should have done. This story is told from 3 points of view. One is from the action on the plane itself in the runway in Algeria. The second is told from the story of Thierry (Vincent Elbaz) the French GIG (SWAT team) leader. The third and most important is the story of Carole (Mélanie Bernier) an assistant in the foreign minister's office. She was the one who realized this was really a suicide mission and there was no negotiating with the GIA terrorist group. She oversteps her authority and steps on a few toes in order to prevent a take off. I believe her role was a bit of a dramatization, but it made the film watchable as we end up with a woman, who is given no credit, saving Paris from burning.

The story was good paced drama-thriller. The voice overs were no better than 1960 Italian film voice overs and has been an on going problem for every French film I have seen in the past few year. I know there are people who can do better voice overs.

This Assault tells the story of the 1994 Hijacking of Air France Fight 8969 with on lot of focus placed on the elite French counter-terrorist unit: the GIGN. The movie is fast paced and has some cool action but it might have been better if they'd toned down the shaky-cam a bit. My only real gripe however, was the slightly one-sided portrayal of the terrorists. Nonetheless, if you like movies like Who Dares Wins, Executive Decision or Zero Dark Thirty then you'll probably like this.

This is an interesting, although partially flawed, French film about a tragic terrorist attack and a spectacularly succesful anti-terrorist operation. Below, more of my impressions, with some limited SPOILERS.

1. The real story.

On 24 December 1994, at Houari Boumedienne Airport of Algiers in Algeria, four armed men dressed and acting as Algerian presidential police boarded Air France Flight 8969 bound to depart for Orly Airport of Paris, France. Moments after they dropped the act and took the control of the plane, revealing that they were not police, but "mujahideen" of Groupe Islamique Armé (GIA), the most radical of Muslim extremists guerillas waging in those times jihad against Algerian regime in order to establish an "islamic state" in Algeria.

The leader of hijackers, Abdul Abdullah Yahia, initially requested that inprisoned Algerian islamist leaders, Abassi Madani and Ali Belhadj, are released. When that was rejected, he requested that the plane is allowed to take off and fly to Paris. When Algerian authorities refused, the terrorists murdered successively three passengers: an Algerian policeman, a Vietnamese diplomat and finally a young French man, Yannick Beugnet, who worked as cook for the French embassy in Algiers. After this third murder, acting on request of French authorities, Algerian government agreed to let the plane take off - but with only enough fuel to make it to Marseille...

Once arrived to Marseille, the hijackers asked for the re-fueling in order to continue towards Paris - but after long negotiations what they got instead was the attack by French elite anti-terrorist unit, the Groupement d'Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale (GIGN).Read more ›